Little Witches

A group of girls at a Catholic boarding school get mixed up in the occult.

While I think it was great to see Jack Nance as the priest, and a nice cameo from Zelda Rubinstein, and heck... we even have the debut of Clea DuVall... this just was not a great movie and seems like little more than an excuse to show a group of young women naked.

I kept thinking this was a cheap version of "The Craft". Now, the plots are not very similar. But a group of young women getting into witchcraft in the mid-1990s during the Wiccan craze? Suspicious. (And actually, this film came out the same year as "The Craft", so maybe the biggest issue was just poor timing.)

Despite most assessments, this isn't a rip-off of "The Craft" because this one actually has a plot which isn't based on a "Nightmare on Elm Street" flick.

And because the women take their clothes off, which is what most male "Craft"~watchers were hoping for.

Guess what? The women here are better looking.

I won't call it a great film, but it's ok ~ and far better than the tedious "The Craft."

2 NiroStars

"Little Witches" follows a group of girls at a Catholic boarding school in Southern California who are holed up together over the Easter vacation. Some rowdy, some bored, and some sexually repressed, they group together and begin dabbling with the occult, and unleash evil beyond their imagination.

Often footnoted as the cut-out bin-equivalent to "The Craft," "Little Witches" is drawing on a lengthy tradition of Catholic schoolgirl occult exploitation that has been a trend dating back to the television films of the seventies—"Satan's School for Girls" and "The Possessed" come to mind. In fact, "Little Witches" is really not all that different from those films, aside from the fact that its straight-to-video release allowed for gratuitous nudity and other material that would've never made it on television. In spite of this, the film very much feels like a made-for-TV movie, with indolent cinematography, a distracting musical score, and anemic performances from just about all involved.

In short, yes, this is a terrible film, one whose main attraction for many is the abundance of female flesh and sacrilegious antics. The flip side? There is definitely an audience for it, and though I can't necessarily count myself as one of them, I can understand where people find the charm in it. The film is peppered with fun scenes, and the over-the-top ending is reminiscent of the hokiest of the "Children of the Corn" sequels. Jennifer Rubin plays the authoritative nun/mother figure of the film, while a young Clea DuVall has a small part as one of the sorores Satanae; Sheeri Rappaport plays the ringleader of the girls, while Mimi Rose plays (unconvincingly) the film's moral center. Zelda Rubinstein also makes a rather amusing token appearance.

Overall, "Little Witches" is a generally weak film that is also a vainglorious B-movie triumph in some sense. It's technically quite abysmal on most accounts, but it also oddly seems to be aware of this. There is fun to be had for the right frame of mind (or right viewer), but at the end of the day, it's still a cheap and easy Satanic sisterhood flick that, while more gratuitous than its peers, does not rise above them. 4/10.

In the grand tradition of B horror movies, this one does have nudity (not to disappoint the male viewers) and stereotypes its characters like crazy, but it was good and actually scary. These were mostly unheard-of actors but they all did a good job. Clea DuVall has gone on since to do other movies: The Faculty and She's All That to name a few. Sheeri Rappaport, Mimi Reichmeister and Jennifer Rubin all were excellent. This movie was a very very effective contribution to the horror genre.

This movie is a time filler. If you having nothing better to do, watch it. But if you want a quality flick, this isn't it. All it is, is a platform for t & a, and that's about it. The story is not much to be desired, but it IS good mindless fun, take notice on the mindless part. This is good to watch when there's nothing on TV and Showtime is showing it AGAIN. As for the Craft ripoff debate, it's not a ripoff, but it does try to be fun in a Craft way, but fails poorly. If you can see it for free, go for it. But don't waste any money seeing it.